1. Technical Field
This patent application relates to data processing, and in particular to managed recovery of the virtual infrastructure in an Information Technology (IT) system.
2. Background Information
Disaster Recovery (DR) is a strategy including people, processes, policies, and technologies for restoring IT systems in the event of a failure. It is also increasingly popular to utilize virtualization tools to enable the most efficient use of IT resources. However, recovering the virtual infrastructure needed to support an environment for a Managed Recovery Program (MRP) is a long and complex task where even small mistakes can cause the overall system to malfunction. Large environments can contain dozens of physical servers that must be precisely configured with hundreds of settings. These settings must be made in a consistent way across a subset of devices in order for all devices to work together correctly.
Within a typical IT production environment, configuration information for these settings is spread across multiple documents. Recovery procedures are also quite susceptible to frequency changes, which are difficult to transmit among systems operators. Additionally, many times the virtual infrastructure itself must be recovered first, before the data recovery can begin.
There are many known approaches to automating disaster recovery and solving the associated administrative problems inside an enterprise. One way is to use the Virtual Machine (VM) restoration solutions from vendors such as NetBackup (available from Symantec Corporation of Sunnyvale, Calif.; Simpina by CommVault Systems of Oceanport, N.J.; and backup products available from Veeam Software AG of Baar, Switzerland. However implementation of those solutions requires not only the underlying hardware infrastructure, but also virtual networking, storage sub systems and the like to already be recovered.
VMware's vCenter Site Recovery Manager (available from VMware, a subsidiary of EMC Corporation of Hopkinton, Mass.) can be used to replicate virtual machines to a secondary site, and supports automated recovery plans.
Other solutions exist for automated detection and management of configuration information as explained in a U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/353,652 filed Jan. 19, 2012 entitled “Automated Configuration Error Detection and Prevention”; it is also known that a managed recovery service can use configuration information to recover logical domains as explained in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/752,835 filed Jan. 29, 2013 entitled “Logical Domain Recovery”. Each of these patents are assigned to SunGard Availability Services, LP the same assignee of the present application and each are incorporated by reference herein.